Tracking ships at sea can help catch sanction-busters

NEVER BEFORERTTGRTTG have the activities of ocean-going vessels been under so much scrutiny. So says Oleg Ustenko, the economics adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, and a leader of a government initiative called the Russian Tanker Tracking Group (). Working with tips from a network of experts and spies, including foreign officials who contribute on the sly, the , Dr Ustenko says, tracks the energy shipments with which “Russia is desperately trying to finance its military machine”.Despite the sanctions imposed by America and Europe, most of Russia’s energy shipments have remained legal. Outrage over its war on Ukraine, however, has left many firms keen to avoid the reputational risks of dealing with entities or goods of Russian origin. Beyond that, as the pandemic and war have tightened commodity markets, the value of detailed data on shipments has risen. As Reid I’Anson of the Houston office of Kpler, a firm of commodities analysts, notes, even traders who won’t buy illicit oil can make better decisions if they can gauge how much sanctioned countries such as Iran are managing to smuggle out.